As to prejudice: Yes, I know i'm a fascist twat.
The purpose of mysterious identities is no longer a fear of partiality. Impartiality is a myth; as you say, people knew who wirthling was through the whole competition, and he won! What if it had been some newbie whose identity was discovered? You can hardly expect the results would have been the same, all else being equal. In fact, I would say the contest promoted the revealing of identities more than anything; to be a reg is a bonus and not a detriment.
Realizing this, but still wanting to revive the cup, I turned mysterious identities into an element of gameplay: I expect at least a few people to be eliminated via their identities being discovered. This threat is the twist of the competition (and the purpose of the mystery): you have to make comics that are both funny and very different from your normal style, because you can lose either by losing a battle or through your identity being discovered.
Now, this is all well and good, but in order to determine whether an identity has been revealed or not, there needs to be some executive body to know all the secret identities and keep track of who has guessed whom. Of course, i could have statistically eliminated some error by choosing a judge or panel of judges to judge the comics and have my sole purpose be to act as keeper of the secret identities, but in the single-judge scenario we really have no guarantee that they will be less partial than myself - and the panel scenario it would dramatically increase the time between fights because as history has repeatedly shown there's always the slow judge that takes a week to cast his vote.
Just like in any country, a dictator may make life hell if he's bad, but nothing's more efficient if he's good. Now be a good boy and enter the contest.
   - Saddam WiLssein